Chinese Social Media Blows Up With Celebratory Posts of Chloe Zhao’s Oscar Win. Hours Later They’re Almost All Erased

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Chinese social media platforms are clamping down on references to Oscar-winning Nomadland Director Chloe Zhao.

Posts about Zhao, who won an Oscar for best director on Sunday, immediately began emerging on Chinese social media websites and search engines, including Weibo, Baidu and Sogou. They were largely eliminated within a matter of hours, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Liza Lin.

The Chinese government had already made it a practice to suppress online references to Nomandland, largely due to a 2013 interview Zhao gave to Filmmaker Magazine in which she said China was full of “lies everywhere.”

“You felt like you were never going to be able to get out,” Zhao told the publication. “A lot of info I received when I was younger was not true, and I became very rebellious toward my family and my background. I went to England suddenly and relearned my history. Studying political science in a liberal arts college was a way for me to figure out what is real. Arm yourself with information, and then challenge that too.”

The interview has since been removed from the magazine’s website, but an archived version was saved by the Wayback Machine.